Update: Steve Fossett has decided to cross the Pacific Ocean at least as far a Hawaii. At this point the situation will be assessed and a decision will be made, either to land in Hawaii, or continue on to the west coast of the United States.

Update: The decision has been made for Steve to continue onwards towards the mainland. Whether he can make it all the way around the world is still an open question, he may be forced to land on the west coast at the first available landing strip on Catalina Island.

Update: A successful touch down at Salina for Steve Fossett and the Global Flyer at 13:50 local time (19:50UTC) on Thursday the 3rd of March, some 67 hours after they took from there on the round the world trip.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.